Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony was written in 1976, disappointed the first audience expecting something more characteristically radical at a new music festival, but found worldwide fame in 1992 via a recording. Its three slow movements each feature Polish texts sung by a soprano: a lament of the Virgin Mary, asking her dying Son to share his wounds with her; a message scratched on a wall of a Gestapo cell, from daughter to mother; and a mother searching for her son killed in war. Hence the work’s subtitle “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”. Most people find it a haunting work, even consoling, but certainly not dramatic. It has no narrative line or story asking to staged.
Director-designer Isabella Bywater explains “You’re looking at a triptych of three states of grief which are related but not the same. I didn’t want to laden it with imagery that makes a heavy statement – I’m trying to leave it as an emotional space.” Her set design reflects the three parts with three grieving women of the symphony via the Dantesque three tiers of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Even the stage space has just three sides (the third, usually the “fourth wall” is that onto the auditorium). The colouring is dominated by pale grey, variegated at times by Roberto Vitalini’s flowing videography.
The first part has an open tomb, with a bier above it, where a white-clad mother unwinds a winding sheet, holds an imagined baby in it, then ascends in her chair, though not as far as the entrance to heaven. The second part adds some actors, perhaps fellow inmates of the Gestapo prison, one pushing a child’s buggy. But their faces are shrouded, perhaps by death masks. If so these revenants have returned to comfort this woman who left a message for her mother on her cell wall.
In the third part, the walls are white ropes suggesting woodland, and various fallen figures are seen, as in a battlefield clearing where a mother searches for a dead son. She is eventually is fitted with folded-up wings, which unfurl to provide passage on high, still not quite to the gates of Paradise, but close enough to be bathed in golden light, as the closing music faded out. Bywater speaks of a setting akin more to an instillation than a dramatisation, and with such a score that might be the right approach.
So the ultimate effect is more evocative adornment than explicatory enhancement, letting the music do its work. How fortunate then that the two house debutants, soprano Nicole Chevalier and conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, excelled. Chevalier’s soprano had the tone, and the tonal weight, to carry these three moving utterances. She also impressed as a stage figure with much to do when not singing, persuasive in movement and in acting the related modes of pain that afflict her characters. And she seemed not at all unnerved by making her vocal entry seated on a flimsy-looking chair suspended high above the stage floor. Yankovskaya provided ideal support in the pit, and clearly has the measure of this tricky score, at times so seemingly unvaried in mood and tempo, so leaving the conductor to ensure it lives and doesn’t stagnate. The first movement’s great arch was superbly shaped, the counterpoint’s unhurried radiance shining in the hands of the ENO players.
